What is Mipmapping?

Textures are hugely important to making 3D scenes look real. They are 2D images that can be applied to polygons to increase realism. Multiple textures can take up a lot of memory. Mipmaps helps to manage their size with various techniques. Mipmapping is a technique used by game engines to reduce the memory footprint and bandwidth demands of textures.

The technique of Mipmapping involves preprocessing a texture to create multiple copies, where each successive copy is one-half the size of the prior copy. When a 3D card has to map a polygon with a texture of a 1:1 relationship of 1 texel (texture element) in the original texture map corresponds to 1 pixel on a polygon. If the polygon you are displaying is scaled down to half size, then effectively the texture is displaying every other texel. This can occasionally lead to some visual weirdness. With mipmapping, you scale the image yourself, before the card gets at it, and since you can pre-process it, you do a better job of it. When the 3D card draws the polygon with the texture on it, it detects the scale factor and selects the correct texture.

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